Donald Trump is staring down decades of Republican Party orthodoxy on a signature issue

Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on America's
free-trade agreements, hitting a peak in his antitrade message
that has swept him through the primary season and into the
general election.

And in doing so, he is breaking with decades of Republican
orthodoxy, staring down party leaders and some of their top
messengers over an issue that has helped define the GOP.

During a speech titled "Declaring American Economic
Independence" last week, Trump called for pulling out of the
North American Free Trade Agreement and for Congress to refuse to
ratify the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership. He also demanded
that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton pledge to
withdraw from TPP on her first day in office, should she be
elected.

During his speech, given just outside Pittsburgh on
Tuesday, Trump called Nafta the "greatest jobs theft in history."
He later said during a rally in southeast Ohio that
night that TPP was "another disaster done and pushed
by special interests who just want to rape our country."

"A continuing rape of our country," he said. "That's what it is,
too. It's a harsh word. It's a rape of our country."

Trump's tough stance on trade aligns him much closer with the
liberal left than it does with the traditional Republicans. As
Trump was blasting trade in a series of speeches and events this
week, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called for ensuring that TPP
doesn't get a vote before Congress. Even Clinton, the
candidate most aligned with the Obama administration, having
served in it as secretary of state, has come out against TPP as
it's currently structured.

"Democrats must do all they can to defeat the TPP.
#StopTPP," Sanders wrote in a tweet.

But no one's antitrade message has been as hard-line as
that of Trump, who places the blame for economic hardships at
home squarely on increased globalization.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

GOP Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a fierce critic of Trump, told
Business Insider in an interview last week that he thought the
Manhattan billionaire's message of "economic independence" was
simply a code for "Fortress America."

"Anybody who believes that we're going to grow economically and
deal with the huge fiscal problems that we have from shutting
ourselves off from the rest of the world is just certainly not
what I'd call a Republican," Flake said. "I mean we believe in
free trade. We still do. Nafta is not a dirty word."

Trump, whose clothing line is produced overseas, has made an
antitrade argument that is "easier to identify," Flake said. He
added that focusing only on the image of people who have lost
their jobs because a factory closed or relocated oversimplified
the issue.

Jeff
Flake.AP Photo/Ross D.
Franklin

"But it's more difficult to identify on the net, companies that
have benefited from exports, cheaper goods," he said. "Not just
cheaper goods but cheaper inputs. So takes a lot longer than a
30-second sound bite. It's incumbent on us who have six-year
terms to be talking about this, and I mean in an election
campaign, you certainly prioritize what you play up and play
down, but boy, to play into the rhetoric and not challenge it
that is going on is inexcusable I think."

He said Congress needed to "suck up" and ratify TPP because "it
has to be done."

"I do still think there are enough people that realize we've got
to do it," he said.

Tony Fratto, the deputy press secretary in the second Bush
administration who is now a managing partner at Hamilton Place
Strategies, was heavily involved in the administration's
international-trade policy. He
told Business Insider in May that an "overwhelming
majority of our job loss, especially in manufacturing, has
nothing to do with trade at all."

"It has to do with the application of technology," he continued.
"It's productivity and management and technology that is being
applied to a lot of complex manufacturing that is reducing the
need for workers. That is not going to change."

"There are lots of presidential candidates who have opposed trade
— there are no presidents who have opposed trade," he added. "In
the postwar period, there have been no antitrade presidents.
Every president has been pro-trade. Even if they hadn't been as
presidential candidates."

The sentiment about technology, and not trade, being the reason
for so many jobs becoming obsolete was exactly what President
Barack Obama expressed in his State of the Union address earlier
this year. But the argument has fallen mostly on deaf ears.

During this week's North American Leaders Summit in Ottawa,
Ontario, the subject of trade was front and center as Obama stood
onstage and answered questions next to his Canadian and Mexican
counterparts — Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto.

Feeling the growing tide of antitrade and anti-Nafta sentiment
brewing back home, Obama said people with concerns over trade had
"a legitimate gripe about globalization."

"As the global economy is integrated, what we've seen are trend
lines across the advanced economies of growing inequality and
stagnant wages, and a smaller and smaller share of overall
productivity and growth going to workers, and a larger portion
going to the top 1%," he said. "And that's a real problem."

Barack
Obama.REUTERS/Kevin
Lamarque

If the trend continues, he said, the "social cohesion" and
"political consensus needed for liberal market economies starts
breaking down."

Such sentiment helped, in part, to put the Leave vote over the
top in last month's British referendum on the UK's membership in
the European Union.

To address the issue, Obama called for investments in education,
rebuilding infrastructure, and having "fair" tax policies.

"And what is absolutely true is that too many folks who have been
in charge around the world have neglected that side of the
equation," he said. "So we're going to keep on pushing hard to
shape an international order that works for our people. But we're
not going to be able to do that by cutting off trade, because
that's going to make all of us poor."

He later added a line that has been all-too-common along the
trail with Trump: "Free trade also has to be fair trade."

Bruce Andrews.AP
Photo/Andreea Alexandru, Mediafax

Bruce Andrews, the deputy secretary of commerce in the Obama
administration, in a recent interview with Business Insider did
not place the blame for "job disruption" on America's trade
agreements.

He said the job loss that has come as a result of globalization
has "happened without any trade agreements."

The deputy secretary also called out people — without naming any
individuals — who "cite competition with China" as an example of
such a reason to oppose a trade deal such as TPP because "we
don't have a free-trade agreement with China."

"Globalization is going to take place whether we do these trade
agreements or not," he said. "The question is do we want to write
the rules. Do we want to make sure that American companies have
the same access that companies from other countries are going to
have?"

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Along with Mexico, the chief reason he is in opposition to Nafta,
Trump has used China as a punching bag for his antitrade message.

During
an event in New Jersey in May, Trump insinuated that trade
deals led to the US being "viewed as the stupid country,"
shrugging off the potential consequences of a trade war with
other countries.

Andrews cited various reasons to stand behind TPP: He considers
it a renegotiation of Nafta with Mexico and Canada, raising
standards with the two countries; it cuts thousands of tariff
lines, which he called "essentially a tax cut" for Americans; and
it opens up a much larger portion of the global markets to
unrestricted access for American corporations.

He, like Obama, emphasized that the US had to do a better job of
training people for the jobs that are available.

"We can't turn the clock back on globalization," he said.
"Globalization is going to happen whether we like it or not. What
we can do is prepare the United States to be competitive, create
the technologies of the future, invest in research and
development, make sure they're manufactured here, making sure our
workers have the skills to do them, then give the products access
to other markets through trade deals."

The argument that trade deals provide cheaper goods to all
Americans, a point that is made by both Republicans and Democrats
who support TPP, was ripped by Trump. During a speech in
New Hampshire on Thursday, he said "we're better off paying a
little bit more and having jobs."

"It's a much better system, the way it used to be," he said. "We
manufacture goods and sell them to other countries. And a lot of
people say the goods will come in and they'll be cheaper, yeah,
but we lost all our jobs. So we're better off if the goods aren't
quite as cheap but we keep our jobs. And the goods will be of a
higher quality because we do a higher-quality good. And we're
known for that. But all of a sudden the jobs are gone."

Michael
Froman.Fiona Goodall/Getty
Images

In a recent interview with Business Insider, US Trade
Representative Michael Froman said the antitrade message from the
campaign — the message championed by Trump — was simple.

"The fact is, you don't get to vote on automation," he said. "You
don't get to vote on whether the next generation of computers or
robots are going to be brought into your workplace. You don't
really get to vote on globalization. It's a force. It's a fact.
It's a reflection of the containerization of shipping, the spread
of broadband, the integration of countries like China and Eastern
Europe that used to be closed to the global economy are now part
of the global economy.

"Trade agreements become the vessel into which people pour quite
legitimate economic insecurities," he continued. "And you do get
to vote on trade agreements, and they do get to become a
scapegoat for a lot of the other concerns, legitimate concerns."